I’m eleven, watching television with you on the mouldering couch in the basement. You grab the remote and mute the abrasive car commercial while I pluck bits of yellow foam out of the couch’s armrest where the fabric has torn away.

“I’d call the ambulance and ride with you all the way to the hospital,” you reply.

“What would you do if I split my brain into two people’s bodies?”

“I’d ask a doctor to put them back together into your real body.”

“But if you couldn’t.”

“I’d love both of you.”

“What would you do if a raptor suddenly came around the corner, just now?”

“I would throw something at it.”

“Like what?”

“My… slipper.”

“What would you do if India replaced its national anthem with Alanis Morissette’s song ‘Thank U’?”

“She and I went to the same high school, did you know that? “

“What would you do if —”

“Years apart, obviously.”

“— I put my hands on the top of my head like this and suddenly peeled it like a giant grapefruit?”

“I don’t know.”

“What would you do if —”

“Last one.”

“— I was actually a bear?”

“I don’t know, I would buy you some honey.”

“What would you do if —”

“Jordan, I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

You would always shut it down the same way. Once you spoke my name, I knew it was final and never pushed it.

When I was nineteen you bought me a laptop as a gift for getting into university. You said, “Now you can ask Google all your questions.” I realized this was your way of letting me know that you didn’t want to play our game anymore, in a more permanent sense. You were telling me it wasn’t a game that adults played with their mothers. In fairness, by that point we hardly did anymore. Perhaps on the odd occasion, in a quiet moment in the car when waiting for a light to turn green, I’d try my luck. “What would you do if that woman started crab-walking across the intersection?”

I held the laptop and smiled, but I wanted to say: Don’t you get it? Google couldn’t give me what I was looking for. Google provided answers to questions. This wasn’t the point of the game. The game was about eliciting increasingly ridiculous rationalizations and responses from you, to test your capacity for patience, imagination, and, frankly, the unseemly. To go with me. To go the distance. To trace the perimeters of your humanity. Perhaps even to trace the perimeters of your love for me.